Sunday, November 3, 2013

Installing SDK version of Sailfish UI on N9

CAUTION: Might break your stuff, back up your nemo installation 
beforehand if you want to be cautious. You have been warned!

!! KNOWN ISSUE !!

Zypper does not always cache the packages, remove lipstick-jolla-home-qt5 with --clean-deps and try again.

Please note, an official guide is coming up from Jolla, which demonstrates this entire process into making an image. This guide will be updated with instructions regarding that.

First things first, you need a working copy of Nemo Mobile running on N9, you can grab one from this link, magnet link. I will not cover the installation of Nemo Mobile for your N9, you can follow this guide to do that.

You also need a working copy of Sailfish SDK running. I will also not cover the installation process here but its quite straightforward to setup. After having a Mer SDK virtual machine instance running, do this to gain ssh access to the virtual machine:

ssh -i ~/SailfishOS/vmshare/ssh/private_keys/engine/mersdk mersdk@localhost -p 2222

In this ssh shell, run:

sb2 -t SailfishOS-armv7hl -m sdk-install -R zypper mr -k -all

Then:

sb2 -t SailfishOS-armv7hl -m sdk-install -R zypper in lipstick-jolla-home-qt5

This generates rpm packages to /parentroot/srv/mer/targets/SailfishOS-armv7hl/var/cache/zypp/packages/jolla/ subdirectories, copy them all over to a separate directory on the host machine as one flat directory, like this:

mkdir ~/sailfishrpms
cd /parentroot/srv/mer/targets/SailfishOS-armv7hl/var/cache/zypp/packages/jolla/
cp ./*/*/*.rpm ~/sailfishrpms/

Copy these over to Nemo Mobile running in N9, using eg. scp. Usually one wants to copy over entire directory like the above sailfishrpms.

Then in the device, over ssh, execute:

cd sailfishrpms
zypper install --force *

This will install all of the generated rpms to the device, although with warnings, afterwards reboot to gain access of the Sailfish, SDK version, homescreen.

 CAUTION: Might break your stuff, back up your nemo installation beforehand if you want to be cautious. You have been warned!